Tag Archives: data caps

The next few days will be a little crazy–starting with a 6 a.m. flight tomorrow to Orlando. I’m returning to Central Florida for the first time since 2011 to cover SpaceX’s attempt Tuesday to launch the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle the U.S. has seen since the Saturn V. Assuming no scrubs, then I’m flying up to New York Tuesday night so I can cover Yahoo Finance’s cryptocurrency-focused All Markets Summit Wednesday, after which I will be delighted to sleep in my own bed once again.

I interviewed Amy at this tech-policy conference. She started with some harsh words about Washington’s ability to forecast future tech trends (her stock in trade), which probably didn’t go over very well in the room even if many policymakers around here need to realize the limits of their vision.

A new study by OpenSignal finding that download speeds at AT&T and Verizon have rebounded after a slump the research firm blamed on their shift to selling unlimited-data plans provided a news peg for this column reminding readers that they may be able to save money by opting for a limited-data plan–as unfashionable as that may be.

Watching a few panels at the Washington Auto Show’s public-policy day last week got me thinking about how Google Maps and connected cars each treat your location history–only one lets you inspect, edit, export and delete that information, and it’s not the one that requires an oil change.

This is the cover story for the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s quarterly magazine that holds up reasonably well for the first three-fourths or so–after which comes a bit on Strava that now looks problematic.

I’ve been meaning to write something about what’s held up the usage of “U2F” security keys–the cryptographically-signed USB fobs that can protect your Gmail or Facebook account from both phishing and the loss of either your phone number or your phone. This new government-cybersecurity site gave me that opportunity.

A couple of years ago, I started thinking that whenever Congress finally passed reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, it would be fun to write a post recapping how long that took. Well, that hasn’t happened, so I decided to use Groundhog Day to instead write a post recapping how long Congress has failed to fix this obsolete law.

I sat down in the studios of Arlington’s low-power FM station WERA in late August with Epstein and my fellow guest (and Washingtonian Tech Titan honoree) Tajha Chappellet-Lanier to talk shop about my profession. A little while later–Epstein is apparently better at working ahead of time than me–the show aired.

You can advance a respectable argument against net-neutrality rules by saying that ISPs have given up on trying to block or slow individual sites. Calling a repeal of those regulations on the behavior of corporations alone “restoring Internet freedom” is not that argument.

I’ve had this story on my to-do list since seeing AirHelp present at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2014. A year later, I finally tasked another company expert in the European Union’s “EC 261” flight-interruption regulation to get Lufthansa to compensate me for the hours-long delay that held up my return from IFA in 2012. The airline sent me a check last March, and then it took me another year and a half to sell a piece about it. That itself only happened when a TPG editor asked if I had other posts in mind after passing on one I’d thought to pitch after seeing a friend’s byline there.

Having our kid come down with strep throat put a serious dent in my productivity on this week. (She’s fine now.) The next five days, meanwhile, have a much more crowded schedule that includes an overnight trip to Cleveland. You’ll find out why Tuesday.

Too-soon hype about 5G wireless is already getting customers confused–as I realized anew when a reader asked how it couldn’t be coming until 2020 if she already had a 5G router. (Answer: It was a 5 GHz router.)

The latest in a steady series of features I’ve written for Fierce’s monthly (registration required) bundles, this one looks at the tangled availability of local channels on “over the top” online-video services. I missed it when it first came out because, I guess, I didn’t see the download link in Fierce’s daily newsletter at the time.

This headline overstates the story a little. My answer to the question–newly raised by an FCC proceeding–of whether we should count the wireless carriers’ mobile broadband as competition for wired cable, fiber and DSL is that a mobile-only strategy doesn’t work as long as you still need to use a desktop or laptop computer.

This piece focuses on a much wonkier subject than my usual consumer-tech coverage, but I carved some time out of my schedule to write it anyway. On one hand, it allowed me to get into the weeds on the workings of some technologies that I do write about all the time. On the other hand, the story was for a site at which I hadn’t written in way too long (my last Ars byline happened over four years ago) and involved a great per-word rate.

That rate, in turn, was a product of this post being part of a set of stories sponsored by Siemens. I didn’t know the sponsor going in and, as I wrote in a comment below the piece, my editor neither told me which companies to feature nor instructed me on any conclusions the article should reach.

This week saw the completion of one rite of spring: attending a Nats home opener. Another, doing our taxes, is in progress. I haven’t even started a third: mowing the lawn for the first time since last year.

I had some fun with the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed broadband labels by noting how they didn’t cover such broadband pain points as the amount of time you may have to spend talking a rep off the ledge before he’ll consent to your closing your account.

I was far along into a different topic when I realized that we hadn’t run anything about the impending shutdown of a once-promising smart-home hub–and that other stories on Nest’s move had glossed over how tech-news sites waited a good two months to cover it.

This was another case of my setting aside one topic to cover another. This may have been the only story on this issue to clarify that AT&T won’t charge you its “device upgrade fee” if you move your old phone’s SIM card into a new device purchased from anybody besides AT&T.

I wrote this essay, sadly enough, while on vacation. But I did leave time that day for a nap! Of course, half the comments were along the lines of “just turn off your phone.” Thanks, dude, that’s a really practical bit of advice.

Speaking of comments, something weird happened with them on this post tonight–the previous 16 comments, including some replies of my own, vanished, and now there’s just one. (It’s from a guy who says his phone is his only Internet device, and he therefore burns through 40 gigabytes of data. I am pained thinking of spending that much time online on any phone.) I’m not sure what happened. Never mind–I was reading a syndicated copy of the story on the site of the St. Louis TV station KSDK but completely ignored the different header atop the story. Duh.

My hunch is that the first group has the wiser strategy. Consider the graph at right, charting my data usage from early March to early April: Even with all of SXSW and more than 900 megabytes’ worth of tethering, I still only racked up 2.13 gigabytes.

And that’s well above average, going by the latest numbers about North American usage from Alcatel-Lucent. That wireless-infrastructure vendor found that LTE users consumed an average of 46 MB a day–about 1.4 gigabytes a month–while 3G users ate up 17 megs a day, or only half a gig.

Am I missing something here? You tell me. Take a look at your own phone’s monthly data consumption and report back in the poll below. To check that detail in Android, open the Settings app and select “Data usage.” In iOS, open the Settings app, tap General, then tap Usage, then “Cellular Usage.” (Note that this isn’t broken down month by month, and that if you want to see which apps ate up the most data you’ll have to spring for a third-party app like DataMan Pro.)

For extra credit: Is that number more or less than you expected, and does it have you rethinking your choice of wireless plan?